rs have begun to wonder if too many fields
are being tried; in 1906, _Dickens_ and _Heretics_.

It will remain a moot point whether the _Browning_ or the _Dickens_
is Chesterton's best work of literary criticism. The _Dickens_ is the
more popular, largely because Dickens is the more popular author.
Most Dickens idolators read anything about their idol if only for the
pleasure of the quotations. And no Dickens idolator could fail to
realise that here was one even more rapt in worship than himself.
After the publication of _Charles Dickens_, Chesterton undertook a
series of prefaces to the novels. In one of them he took the trouble
to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced: the
comment that he was reading into the work of Dickens something that
Dickens did not mean.

Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they
knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they
did not know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a
pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures
made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have
said that. If Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer
to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function
at all, can only be one function--that of dealing with the
subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can
express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which
the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a
very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an
author the very things that would have made him jump out of his
boots.*

[* Introduction to "Old Curiosity Shop." Reprinted in _Criticisms and
Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens_, 1933 ed. pp. 51-2.]

He attended not at all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies.
One reviewer pointed out that Chesterton had said that every postcard
Dickens wrote was a work of art; but Dickens died on June 9th, 1870
and the first British postcard was issued on October 1st, 1870. "A
wonderful instance of Dickens's never-varying propensity to keep
ahead of his age." After all, what did such things matter? Bernard
Shaw, however, felt that they did. He wrote a letter from which I
think Gilbert got an important hint, utilized later in his
introduction to _David Copperfield:_

6th September, 1906.

DEAR G.